1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to the field of digital video, and more specifically, to methods of automatically identifying categories representative of videos and training classifiers for the identified categories.
2. Background of the Invention
Categorizing a digital video associates the video with an indicator of a category that the video or a portion thereof represents, such as “cartoon” or “aircraft type.” Automatic categorization of videos stored by video hosting services such as YOUTUBE is of great benefit to users of such systems, permitting the users to more effectively determine whether the video would be of interest to them by examining or otherwise using the video's associated category or categories.
Conventional video categorization systems typically use categories that are manually constructed. Such manually constructed categories do not adapt well to changing video corpuses, in which new concepts arise periodically and therefore require new labels for categorizing them. Furthermore, in order to determine which terms can serve as the more general categories that encompass the concepts of other more specific terms, the terms must be specifically structured in a taxonomy or other hierarchy, which is still more time-consuming to manually construct and thus less capable of adapting to new types of videos.